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rookie-critic · 1 year

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Rookie-Critic's Film Review Weekend Wrap-Up - Week of 4/24-4/30/2023

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019, dir. David Leitch) This was a good off-shoot for the F&F series. The Rock & Jason Statham feel comfortable as the titular duo and have excellent on-screen chemistry, and the action feels clean and exciting, which is no surprise considering the film was directed by John Wick-veteran David Leitch, who fits the franchise like a glove. I really enjoyed all of the climactic fight scenes with Hobbs' family in Samoa. Honestly, the more Cliff Curtis can be in major feature films, the better. Idris Elba and Vanessa Kirby also make for great additions to the growing franchise. It never really blew my mind like some of the mainline Fast films have, but I don't think it was really trying to. Sometimes a movie is just good, dumb, clean fun, and that's perfectly alright with me. I just hate that this film (along with a multitude of other behind-the-scenes reasons) means that we probably won't be seeing Luke Hobbs in any of the remaining Fast movies.

Score: 7/10

Currently available to rent/purchase on digital (iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, etc.) and on 4K, Blu-ray & DVD through Universal Studios.

F9: The Fast Saga (2021, dir. Justin Lin) After the wholly disappointing and, frankly, upsetting misstep that was The Fate of the Furious, I was curious to see if F9 would continue the downward trend, or if it would step its game up to bring some of the franchise's former glory back. When in doubt, trust in Justin Lin, who comes swooping back into the franchise for the first time since Fast & Furious 6 to save the day, with fan favorite character Han Lue in tow. This is biggest, wildest fast film yet, and I mean that as a compliment. That's not to say that it's the best (that honor is still held by Fast Five), but it does return a lot of the wonder and sincerity that Five, Six, and (to a lesser extent) Seven had. Not to mention that it is the first film in the franchise to incorporate Sean, Twinkie, and Earl from Tokyo Drift into the family in a major way since Tokyo Drift (if you don't count a tiny cameo from Lucas Black's Sean in Furious 7). Nothing about F9 feels as baseline or low-effort as the stuff in Fate did. Even the introduction of a mysterious third Toretto sibling that, for some reason, we hadn't heard about for the past eight films feels out of place or shoehorned in. Needless to say, where Fate of the Furious had me wondering if the franchise was receding in quality, F9 has me just as pumped to go see Fast X in May as I was after watching Fast Five.

Score: 8/10

Currently streaming on HBO Max.

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (2023, dir. Guy Ritchie) I went into this with a lot of apprehension. I was not a huge fan of the last Guy Ritchie film that tried to take a more serious approach to its tone (2021's Wrath of Man). It had a lot of grandstanding machismo bullshit that I hate to see in modern filmmaking. However, Ritchie really surprised me with The Covenant. He has Jake Gyllenhaal acting at the top of his game here with an equally impressive turn from Dar Salim as Ahmed the interpreter. While the story is fiction, it highlights a huge problem in the aftermath of the War on Terror: thousands of Afghani interpreters were hired by the U.S. military and promised special immigration visas for their service; a promise that turned out to be hollow. It sends its message without grandstanding and is critical of the U.S. military without putting itself on a soapbox. The film does tend to get overly self-indulgent during big sweeping climactic scenes and in certain emotional ones, as well. It's the one thing about the film that feels out of place, but even in spite of that, The Covenant is an excellent film and proof that Ritchie is capable of making a more serious-minded, message-oriented film than the humorous heist or caper films he's known for.

Score: 8/10

Currently only in theaters.

Chevalier (2023, dir. Stephen Williams) I'll just say up front that my bias might show a little in my scoring of this one. I have never been the biggest fan of 16-1800's period pieces. I'm not sure what it is, but something about them has just never gelled with me. That being said, there's nothing really wrong with Chevalier. In fact, it is, in my opinion, much better than the average film of this sensibility. The acting is fantastic and it sheds light on an oft-overlook but quintessentially influential figure in both classical music and the French revolution. The music is a huge plus in the film's favor, of course, and the costumes are, as is the case with most film's set in this era, masterfully crafted. I think my biggest qualm with the film is that it stops right as the French revolution is getting started and then tells the audience that Chevalier went on to be a great leader during the Revolution. Maybe it's just me, but I think that sounds interesting enough to make it's own film about. This almost makes me wonder (and I don't ever really feel this way about films) if this would have been better suited as an 6-8 episode miniseries as opposed to a film. We still could have focused a 2-3 episodes on Chevalier's childhood and young adulthood in France's pre-Revolution music scene, but then dedicated an entire half of the show to his accomplishments during the Revolution. Regardless, I don't want that to take away from the fact the Chevalier was quite good, and definitely worth the ticket price. I just think more could have been done with the wealth of untold history that exists within the lifetime of this figure.

Score: 7/10

Currently only in theaters.

Polite Society (2023, dir. Nida Manzoor) This movie absolutely ruled. It gave me all of the frenetic energy of the best Edgar Wright films while also giving me the genre-bending and jaw-dropping off-the-wall attitude of something like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. This was a film that wasn't afraid to go for it in every way, shape, and form. From campy-but-well-choreographed fight sequences, to plot twist that twist so hard they'll make your head spin, to an unabashed approach to a female-empowerment narrative. Not to mention a story that is very uniquely Indian that touches on the nature of arranged marriages and classicism. Polite Society had everything that I look for in a film, and is a very early contender for the best of 2023 list. I'll save some of my more in-depth thoughts on stuff like the acting, writing, and cinematography for this week's full-length, but just know that if anything I've mentioned above sounds even remotely interesting, make this a priority watch (I don't want to say definitively that this is the best of the weekend's new movies because I haven't seen Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret yet, and I hear that is pretty amazing, as well).

Score: 10/10

Currently only in theaters.

A Good Man (2014, dir. Keoni Waxman) Yikes. Just... yikes. Friday movie nights with my college friends can get pretty wild sometimes. I've never seen a Steven Seagal film before, and maybe this wasn't the best one to start with (or, inversely, maybe it's the best one to start with). Seagal is clearly past his prime here (or, again, maybe in his prime, depending on your perspective), and looks like he's constantly on the verge of passing out. His words come out slurred and mumbled like he's on his deathbed, and his "action" in the film is cut around so heavily you really never see him actually do anything. The story is non-existent and the writing contains some of the most unintentionally hilarious one-liners I have ever heard in my entire life (I'm partial to the one where Seagal utters the baffling sentence "Well, I'm sorry to hear that, because now I'll snatch every motherfucker birthday." No, there's no typo there, that is verbatim what he says. My meme review is that this is great. Real "The Room" caliber stuff, here. My actual review is that obviously Seagal is a lunatic that is just self-funding whatever production he can fart out in an afternoon at this point. Honestly, if you want some quality takes on this, visit the Letterbox'd page.

Score: 1/10

Currently streaming for free with ads on Redbox. Tzi Ma should be above stuff like this.

Sisu (2023, dir. Jalmari Helander) I really wanted to love Sisu. I'm as much a fan of mindless action movies as the next guy, but the truth is I thought it was just ok. It delivers on exactly what it promised everyone in the trailers, one-man army kills the crap out of some Nazis for 91 minutes, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. There are a handful of really fun set pieces and lots of entertaining gore for fans of that kind of thing, but it just felt incredibly hollow. There are no characters in Sisu, only templates of archetypes that things happen to. No one learns anything, there's no journey to be had, merely an avatar quickly making his way through bodies to get to a destination. I'm not implying that every single movie needs to have some grand, elaborate story with deep and complex characters and rich subtext or anything like that, but I would have liked at least some substance to this. There are still things to enjoy in Sisu, and from what I've read I'm a slight outlier in not thinking this is incredible, but it just didn't connect with me. However, don't let that stop you from seeing this in the theater. The cinematography and style alone are worth the big screen experience.

Score: 6/10

Currently only in theaters.

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thevindicativevordan · 1 year

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How waa 2022 for non-Superman DC comics?

Running through the other major Leaguers and a few others:

Batman - Unusually for Batman it was a mixed year. Film wise he of course did great, The Batman kicked off a new cinematic incarnation to widespread critical approval and solid commercial success. Multiple spinoffs set in that universe are in the works for HBO Max. Comics wise he (or his extended supporting cast) has a book for everyone and they run the gamut of great to crap. Shockingly his The Caped Crusader animated series instead of Superman's is the one that got sent on the road to find a home elsewhere, instead of on HBO Max and CN as originally planned. It looks like Amazon Prime will likely be where that lands but no official confirmation yet. Video game wise Gotham Knights flopped hard, getting mediocre reviews and even worse sales from what I've seen. There's also that terrible CW show of the same name still coming.

Wonder Woman - Historia carried her hard, being a truly legendary story that I think easily deserves to be the definitive origin for her and the Amazons. Outside of that her comics were mediocre, and of course WW3 got cancelled. Jenkins is finished and it looks like Gadot will be too, with her cameos in the movies coming this year serving as her swan song. At least the Monolith video game is safe for now.

The Flash - Adams' Wally book remained good and Barry's role in Dark Crisis was fine. Barry really shone in the Voidsong mini, I'd love to see that creative team do more with him, Miller of course made headlines but I expect most people didn't notice or care and that it won't really negatively impact the upcoming movie's box office performance.

Green Lantern - I enjoyed Thorne's GL run but man did plenty of people hate it. Still between Thorne and the Dark Crisis tie in issue, I think John had a good year. Hal came in second with decent usage in Dark Crisis. Jo came in third with her half of Thorne's book using her well. Rest of the GLs didn't get shit and Thorne's big massacre of the GLC got promptly undone, which even as a fan of Thorne I'm fine with because the GLC being on the verge of extinction is a plot I don't want to see anymore.

Aquaman - Probably his worst one since the Johns reboot. Attempts to push Jackson and Black Manta into the lead roles flopped hard. Neither the Jackson nor the Black Manta minis sold well, and the Aquamen mini it was all leading up to didn't even debut in the top 100 issues sold for the month it launched if memory serves me. I don't know what DC editorial, Brandon Thomas, or Chuck Brown were thinking but man did they totally shoot themselves in the foot. At least Aquaman & The Flash: Voidsong by Lanzig and Kelly ruled, that was Arthur's only comic win. Oh and WBD took the Aquaman: King of the Seas miniseries off of HBO Max, either to sell it to Amazon Prime or use it as a tax write-off.

Titans - They were terrible as always. Titans Academy ended with a whimper as yet another bold new direction for the franchise failed to take off.

JSA - Hey they finally got a new book!.. which is far more interested in Hypertime, Watchmen, and Huntress/Batman bullshit than it is in the actual JSA so far. Oh and it's been hit by delays too because it wouldn't be a Johns book without those! Least they had a great showing in Stargirl, both the show and the comic.

Black Adam - Hahaha oh Lord what a fucking disaster his push ended up being. The Rock indeed helped facilitate a change in DC's hierarchy by tanking at the box office, and making it easy for Gunn to cut ties with him. Priest's Black Adam was the only good thing to come out starring him, which is half a great character study on what a monster Adam is and half whatever the hell Priest is doing with Malik. Series lost it's star artist in Sandoval the minute it became clear the movie was a bust (not that I'm complaining), and Dark Crisis hilariously ended with an explicit Rock homage. Unless Johns once more fishes his boy from the wreckage after Priest's mini wraps up, I think Adam is due a benching for a while.

#year in review

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justloatheyoulately · 1 year

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I posted 5,434 times in 2022

That's 935 more posts than 2021!

79 posts created (1%)

5,355 posts reblogged (99%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@strawberry-crocodile

@consolationblog

@domperignonubroughtit

@susiephone

@eclipsedsuns

I tagged 503 of my posts in 2022

#taylor swift - 38 posts

#miraculous ladybug - 26 posts

#spy x family - 23 posts

#my art - 16 posts

#loid forger - 15 posts

#yor forger - 13 posts

#sxf - 11 posts

#anya forger - 10 posts

#ladynoir - 9 posts

#chat noir - 9 posts

Longest Tag: 134 characters

#then they angerly suggest because you haven’t explicitly said you are queer you are bad and can only do certain things if you come out

My Top Posts in 2022:

Y’all learned the word queerbaiting and never shut the fuck up. REAL PEOPLE CANNOT QUEERBAIT. It’s good if people are not conforming to societies heteronormative sexual or gender expectation regardless of sexual orientation. It helps everyone including queer people. Celebrities don’t have to come out to dress or act how it feels true to themselves

17 notes - Posted September 14, 2022

I hope with the new hbo max scandal more people will finally be skeptical of these mega corporations. When 3 companies own all your favorite shows/movies that routinely make you happy, we’ve just seen how easily they can make those things disappear…

20 notes - Posted August 20, 2022

I know that if us swifties band together with the BTS fans we can and will kill the monopoly that is Ticketmaster. We would be unstoppable

35 notes - Posted November 17, 2022

The best genre of movie is literary classic turned high school comedy

212 notes - Posted October 1, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

I hate hbo max. I hate Disney +. I hate Amazon prime. I hate streaming platforms that treat their staff and creators like donkey shit. I hate that they don’t compensate for rewatches or popularity and can’t even take out the fucking commercials. I hate our monthly fees for media that can just be put in the vault and written off as if it never existed. I hate our reliance on mega corporations for our daily serotonin. I want weekly shows where I can theorize with my friends. I want dvds to be popular again. I want no commercials and for my favorite creators to be paid to imagine a better world than this.

87,359 notes - Posted August 20, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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teamfreewill2pointo · 2 years

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I am a JA fan that wanted/wants JA to explore other networks like Amazon and the Boys. Don’t hate CW, and producing a show(s) for them is fine. I just want to see Jensen in a variety of stuff, some more adult, like TB. CW caters to a younger, family oriented crowd, which is fine, but I would like him in mix of stuff.

I'm going to be completely transparent and say that part of why I want to see J2M on more "adult" networks is that I enjoy seeing them naked. I was already a fan of The Boys before I heard Jensen joined. I'm not fandom levels of fan, but I do enjoy watching the show. Looking forward to seeing Jensen's butt.

I also just tend to prefer shows outside of the CW. A lot of the CW is focused on the teen/young adult crowd and I'm just not interested in those types of stories. I'm aro and find the romance storylines on most shows completely boring. Supernatural was very atypical for the CW.

Anon 2: "Big Sky likely isn't my kind of show, just as Walker isn't. I gave Walker a try and will do the same for Big Sky. Regardless, I am a huge JA fan, so I may try a bit harder with Big Sky. Loved TB before Jensen came on board so jammin about that. Looking forward to TW and GK as well. These guys all are doing well."

[removed some negativity to keep it a positive post]

TW and GK both look a bit young to me, even though I am a fan of the universe of both of them. Batman universe stuff tends to be hit or miss for me. I grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series and Batman: The Caped Crusader has Bruce Timm, who did BTAS. HBO Max's version of Batman interests me more than the CW version. Batman is one of my favorites, so I can't imagine a show without him. I'm also negatively interested in straight romances, so that's another reason I'm personally not keen on The Winchesters, although I will give it a shot. I'm hoping that Jensen brings The Winchesters back into the early SPN/XFiles style of shooting horror. It looks that way from the set photos, but we'll see. I love the atmosphere of early seasons spn and it seems Jensen does as well.

I watched the first 3-4 episodes of Big Sky last night and I'll probably continue watching through. I wasn't feeling the Pilot at all until what happened at the end. I like twisty shows and it reminds me of The Killing, although not nearly as good. I can see why Jensen wanted to do it and I hope he has fun with it.

#answers #anon #big sky #gk #tw #tb

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fahrni · 2 years

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Saturday Morning Coffee

My lovely wife made me a mocha to go with composing this weeks post. That combined with oxycodone, ice, and elevation are doing their job. I can focus well enough to get this done. 🤞🏼

Shelly Rosen: ”The way Google’s two-factor authentication system is designed, sets up poor and elderly people to be locked out of their accounts again and again, and without access to their email, they lose their welfare benefits, their housing, and struggle to find work.”

I’m not sure what Google can do to fix this extremely important problem. Take some time to read Ms. Rosen’s letter it lays everything out for Google. As a developer this is the kind of feedback you hope to get from folks using your software.

TechCrunch: ”Amazon this morning announced plans to acquire Roomba maker iRobot for an all-cash deal valued at $1.7 billion.”

Alexa, don’t vacuum the cat. This seems like a really sweet deal for Amazon. I can’t believe iRobot couldn’t fetch a higher price.

Los Angeles Times: “The California Department of Motor Vehicles has accused Tesla of false advertising in its promotion of the company’s signature Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technologies.”

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Tesla has been touring Full Self Drive for years and they’re no where near the desired functionality. Is it novel? Yes. Do I trust it? No way.

I can’t wrap my brain around the challenges the developers must be facing. And the icing on the cake would be Musk breathing down your neck to get it done. No thanks.

My idea of a better challenge would be tackling mass transit with electric motors and making it easier to travel long distances on electric trains and busses.

Heck, the eBikes business is really taking off.

Cartoon Brew: ”Dreamworks Animation has unveiled plans to release its proprietary production renderer Moonray as open-source software later this year.”

I’ve had a fascination with rendering pipelines for years and years. As far as I know Pixar’s RenderMan is still the Cadillac of rendering software but having an open source choice from a heavy hitter like Dreamworks is worthy of consideration, and it’ll be open so folks can contribute to it. Amazing!

When the git repo is made public you know I’ll be there poking around. 😃

Makes you wonder if Pixar will follow with RenderMan?

TechCrunch: ”Infowars founder Alex Jones took the stand today in a trial that will determine what he owes to the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting. Last year, Jones was found liable in a series of defamation cases brought by the parents of Sandy Hook victims.”

Alex Jones is a grifter. He has an unwitting audience of people willing to believe anything because they hate everything and everyone. Jones feeds their animosity with wild stories of the deep state and blood drinking Democrats to drain them of their hard earned cash. Who’s the vampire?

Vulture: ”It’s pretty well known and even darkly joked about across all the visual-effects houses that working on Marvel shows is really hard. When I worked on one movie, it was almost six months of overtime every day. I was working seven days a week, averaging 64 hours a week on a good week. Marvel genuinely works you really hard. I’ve had co-workers sit next to me, break down, and start crying. I’ve had people having anxiety attacks on the phone.”

I don’t think this is a new reality of the VFX business. Rather, a horrible expectation set by major studios.

Deadline: ”Even though Batgirl is in the final stages of post-production, Deadline has confirmed that Warner Bros. and DC Films will not be releasing the movie on any platform, including theatrically.”

This is a real bummer. I was totally ready for it.

As far as release platforms go, I was fully expecting it to appear on HBO Max. It’s the streaming platform I use more than any other. More than Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Apple TV. Each of those services has a place in my streaming lineup, but HBO’s ability to release new movies to streaming early is it’s real superpower.

The Washington Post: ”SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk’s countersuit to Twitter contains aggressive new claims about the social media site’s methods for tallying bot and spam accounts — as well as which accounts generate ad revenue — cementing the strategy the billionaire is using to attempt to back out of the deal.”

I suspect Musk will be forced to show up and pay $54.20 per share.

The big question is, once he owns it can he make it something better or will he lose an uphill battle?

How do you deal with bot problems and nihilistic American politicians hell bent on turning our democracy into a self serving dictatorship.

I’m sure Mr. Musk has some really great ideas. It’s the bad ideas I’m worried about.

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed your coffee or tea with your read. ☕️

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cartoonrankings · 2 years

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Best Cartoons of the 2000s

The 2000s were an interesting time period for cartoons. So many fun slice-of-life shows for children, some awesome story-based shows and even some amazing shows catered towards teenagers and adults. It truly was a magical time with many outstanding cartoons. Here are my best cartoons from the 2000s!

10. The Grim Adventures of Bill and Mandy

Seeing how this is a list talking about the best cartoons of the 2000s, what better way to start off the list other than Cartoon Network’s hit series Bill and Mandy? Spanning a total of six seasons and running from 2001 to 2007, Bill and Mandy became a classic pretty quickly. The story revolves around a grim reaper that is forced to be companions to Bill and Mandy, two friends and this leads to many fun adventures. Overall, it is a pretty fun series delivering lots of slapstick comedy and even does transcends into dark themes at times. I love the premise alone, but the humor makes watching it even more satisfying. I also really commend the show for its excellent voice acting. While it is great, some episodes in the later half of the series can be weaker than others early on which is why it is only at number 10. Nonetheless, it is a great show with many more highs than lows. Watch it if you haven’t! You can watch it on HBO Max, Amazon Instant Video or iTunes.

9. 6Teen

Ah, Canada. The mid-late 2000s was an interesting time for Cartoon Network. Lots of Canadian exports dominated the channel, and while Canada does get hate for their cartoons, I strongly disagree. They do have lots of mainstream cartoons that are great like Total Drama and they have some more obscure gems like this one (and there is one more obscure gem from the 2010s I can’t wait to talk about). The series spanned from 2004 to 2010 running a total of 93 episodes. It is about 6 teenagers, Wyatt, Caitlin, Nikki, Jen, Jude and Jonesy who are just living everyday teenager lives. They go through lots of problems that teenagers go through such as losing a job (some more than others *cough* Jonesy *cough*), social issues and dealing with exams. It is a great show for teens, and one character that really stands out to me is Caitlin - she starts out as a shallow girl who is spoilt and we get to watch her character develop once she befriends the rest of the gang. The more raunchy humor is another plus. Despite having a few weaker episodes, the series stayed strong for its 93 episode run and it’s always fun to rewatch! You can watch 6Teen on the YouTube channel, Retro Rerun, Amazon Prime, Pluto or Tubi.

8. Invader Zim

Like 6Teen, Invader Zim was a series that while it was aimed at a younger audience, it was edgy. Though with Zim, it was more dark than raunchy. This dark cartoon comedy ran from 2001 to 2006 with a total of 2 seasons and 27 episodes. It revolves around an alien named Zim who gets sent to Earth by the Irken race as an attempt to get rid of him. Zim along with his brain dead robot assistant GIR attempt to conquer earth, and the only one aware of their plans is Zim’s classmate, Dib (Zim went to school to disguise as a normal kid). The plot points this series takes is truly amazing, and while some episodes are grotesque (there was an entire episode dedicated to Zim eating other student’s organs), they are never gross to the point where I wish to stop watching. Some highlights for me are the much darker themes and humor, the pacing which was relatively fast and made it so that the episodes would never feel too boring and the voice acting. I really commend Richard Horvitz as Zim. I also cannot stress enough how the dark atmosphere and colors add so much more to the series for me. It was overall a great show and I’d even argue it was ahead of its time. You can watch Invader Zim on Paramount+, Amazon Instant Video or iTunes.

7. The Boondocks

While the three previous shows I have covered in this list were edgier shows aimed at a younger audience, entry number 7 does actually aim towards an older audience. The Boondocks was a series running from 2005 to 2014 spanning 4 seasons and a total of 55 episodes. The series revolves around brothers Huey and Riley Freeman who move from Chicago to live with their grandpa in the suburbs. The black siblings try embracing a mostly white environment and they go through their struggles trying to fit in. Huey is more of a freedom fighter while Riley is “thugged out” to the max which provides many interesting and downright funny stories for both of them. Two highlights would be the episode “The Red Ball” where Huey leads the baseball team against a rigged team, and “The Fundraiser” where Riley organizes a fundraiser for his own selfish needs. While being a funny show, it was also quite introspective giving us the American life from a black perspective. This really was a great way to make people think outside of the way they usually think. My favorite character is Riley with his “thugged out” nature and his absolutely hilarious moments. Another highlight is the anime-influenced artstyle. The creator Aaron McGruder did say he was influenced by Cowboy Bebop. Despite 3 absolutely amazing seasons, the fourth one was weaker than the rest due to the creator leaving and at times felt more racist and embracing of the stereotypes instead of providing more of a social commentary. Due to the flaws with the last season, it earns a #7 spot. Overall, I still highly recommend it as it is an amazing show. You can watch The Boondocks on Amazon Prime Video.

6. Samurai Jack

Samurais are already such an interesting concept, and cartoons are something I love so what could go wrong with a cartoon about samurais? Absolutely nothing! Samurai Jack was a cartoon which ran from 2001 to 2004 only to return in 2017 for one final season. The series ran for 62 episodes. It revolves around a samurai named Jack who tries to stop Aku, a shapeshifting demon who has taken over his kingdom. Unfortunately, Aku sends him into the dystopian future where he is ruler. The first 4 seasons had a younger audience in mind, while the fifth targeted an older audience.The fifth season’s darker approach was outstanding as well, and while many did not like the ending, I loved it! Some factors I love about the series are the darker themes (especially in the later seasons), the very cool art style and colors which compliment the series very well and the awesome voice acting, especially by Phil LaMarr as the lead character. I would recommend Samurai Jack to anyone that hasn’t seen it. You can watch Samurai Jack on HBO Max.

5. Kim Possible

After mentioning a lot of Cartoon Network shows, it was only fair I mentioned a Disney show, and what show from the 2000s is better than Kim Possible? A comedy with plenty of action and adventure that ran from 2002 to 2007 and had a total of 87 episodes amongst its 4 seasons. It was about Kim, a high school cheerleader who was also a crimefighter. Assisted by her friend Ron and his pet mole rat, Rufus, Kim fought crime all over the world while still managing a “normal” school life. One way Kim Possible approached the high school crime fighter plot line differently which stood out for me was that Kim’s identity was not hidden. This really made it unique as in most shows with this concept, the protagonist’s identity remains hidden. Some of the highlights of this show are the fantastic characters (my favorites are Kim, Rufus and Shego), the unique concepts and the action. Some standout episodes to me are Rappin’ Draken, Trading Faces and of course the final episode. I would definitely recommend watching the entire series. You can watch Kim Possible on Disney +.

4. Clone High

Way way back in the 1980s…just joking. We’re not going that far. Clone High was a classic cartoon that unfortunately only ran for one season comprising thirteen episodes. However, a reboot will be coming sometime soon. It was a very fascinating show with probably the most intriguing concept on this list. The series is a high school dramedy aimed at a slightly older audience. But get this: the students are all clones of famous people like John F Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, etc. However, secretly, the clones are being used as a military experiment by a government organization. Filled with high school humor and a serious back story, Clone High was ahead of its time. The best part of this show is easily John F Kennedy’s character. Though, I would also like to praise the show’s unique artstyle which has started a whole new look prominent in Canada as seen in shows like Total Drama, 6Teen and Detentionaire. I also love the humor. I really recommend Clone High to anyone who hasn’t seen it. You can watch Clone High on the YouTube channel Retro Rerun, Paramount + or Amazon Prime Video.

3. Spectacular Spider Man

Spider Man is someone we all know and love...but have you guys heard of his underground series, Spectacular Spider Man? A series which ran from 2008 to 2009 and contained a total of 26 episodes. An awesome tale focusing on the origins of Spider Man, and it kept me hooked throughout. Some highlights for me are the high paced fight scenes, the awesome voice acting from the entire cast (but Josh Keaton stood out the most to me in his role as Spider Man) and the depiction of Spider Man. The series depicts Peter as a teenager really well as we get to see him learn about his responsibility as a superhero. Easily an awesome show which I recommend. You can watch Spectacular Spider Man on Netflix.

2. Teen Titans

Ah yes, the good old Teen Titans that we all grew up with. I’m sure this was expected. Teen Titans had a total of 65 episodes in it’s 5 season run from 2003 to 2006. This series revolved around a group of 5 heroes that call themselves the Teen Titans. The team consists of the leader Robin, a hero with the power to morph into animals named Beast Boy, an alien princess named Starfire, a cyborg named well…Cyborg and a goth girl with telekinesis named Raven. The series goes through multiple arcs with each arc focusing on a different character. What isn’t there to love about this show? Great voice acting, a soundtrack that matches the intensity of the show, a team of awesome superheroes with distinct personalities and arcs that are both action packed and heavy on emotion. I’m not going to sugarcoat this: watch Teen Titans. You can watch Teen Titans on HBO Max, Vudu, Google Instant Play, Amazon Instant Video or iTunes.

1. Avatar: The Last Airbender

If anybody who knows me in real life is reading this blog, they’d have known what number 1 would’ve been already. I mean who wouldn’t put this cartoon in their best cartoons of the 2000s list? This absolute gem of a show: Avatar: The Last Airbender. Avatar: The Last Airbender was a series that lasted for 3 seasons and had a total of 61 episodes. The series takes place in a world where there are 4 divided nations: water, earth, fire and air. The four nations lived in peace until the fire nation attacked. Only the Avatar who can master all four elements can restore peace. The Avatar is a young boy named Aang who alongside his new friends, Katara and Sokka travel to different nations in order for him to learn all the elements and to be capable of taking down the fire lord, Ozai. Where do I start with this show? It is perfect: the story is amazingly done, it has great humor, the anime-styled designs are amazing (seriously, I hear people talking about cartoons that look like anime a lot and this one is the best from those), the intense and emotional music, heck, I could go on forever. If I were to narrow it down to one thing I love about the show, it would be the fact that there are characters I deeply care about. And the reason I care for them is because they’re written so beautifully and the situations that they are put in are executed so well that you can’t help but to care for them. I am sure most of you have seen it but if not, watch it as soon as you can! You can watch Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix, the Nick+ channel on Amazon, iTunes or Google Play.

Well, these are my best cartoons of the 2000s! I hope I introduced you to some new awesome cartoons! Which of these cartoons would you agree with? Which would you disagree with? What is your top 10 cartoons list? Are you going to watch any of the cartoons on this list? Let’s discuss in the comments!

And make sure you follow my Tumblr page for weekly blogs! I promise I won’t disappoint!

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grigori77 · 3 years

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Movies of 2021 - My Pre-Summer Favourites (Part 2)

The Top Ten:

10. ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE – one of the undisputable highlights of the Winter-Spring period has to be the long-awaited, much vaunted redressing of a balance that’s been a particular thorn in the side of DC cinematic fans for over three years now – the completion and restoration of the true, unadulterated original director’s cut of the painfully abortive DCEU team-up movie that was absolutely butchered when Joss Whedon took over from original director Zack Snyder and then heavily rewrote and largely reshot the whole thing. It was a somewhat painful experience to view in cinemas back in 2017 – sure, there were bits that worked, but most of it didn’t and it wasn’t like the underrated Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, which improves immensely on subsequent viewings (especially in the three hour-long director’s cut). No, Whedon’s film was a MESS. Needless to say fans were up in arms, and once word got out that the finished film was not at all what Snyder originally intended, a vocal, forceful online campaign began to restore what quickly became known as the Snyder Cut. Thank the gods that Warner Bros listened to them, ultimately taking advantage of the intriguing alternative possibilities provided by their streaming service HBO Max to allow Snyder to present his fully reinstated creation in its entirety. The only remaining question, of course, is simply … is it actually any good? Well it’s certainly much more like BVS:DOG than Whedon’s film ever was, and there’s no denying that, much like the rest of Snyder’s oeuvre, this is a proper marmite movie – there are gonna people who hate it no matter what, but the faithful, the fans, or simply those who are willing to open their minds are going to find much to enjoy here. The damage has been thoroughly patched, most of the elements that didn’t work in the theatrical release having been swapped out or reworked so that now they pay off BEAUTIFULLY. This time the quest of Bruce Wayne/Batman (Ben Affleck) and Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) to bring the first iteration of the Justice League together – half-Atlantean superhuman Arthur Curry/the Aquaman (Jason Momoa), lightning-powered speedster Barry Allan/the Flash (Fantastic Beasts’ Ezra Miller) and cybernetically-rebuilt genius Victor Stone/Cyborg (relative newcomer Ray Fisher) – not only feels organic, but NECESSARY, as does their desperate scheme to use one of the three alien Mother Boxes (no longer just shiny McGuffins but now genuinely well-realised technological forces that threaten cataclysm as much as they provide opportunity for miracles) to bring Clark Kent/Superman (Henry Cavill) back from the dead, especially given the far more compelling threat of this version’s collection of villains. Ciaran Hinds’ mocapped monstrosity Steppenwolf is a far more palpable and interesting big bad this time round, given a more intricate backstory that also ties in a far greater ultimate mega-villain that would have become the DCEU’s Thanos had Snyder had his way to begin with – Darkseid (Ray Porter), tyrannical ruler of Apokolips and one of the most powerful and hated beings in the Universe, who could have ushered the DCEU’s now aborted New Gods storyline to the big screen. The newer members of the League receive far more screen-time and vastly improved backstory too, Miller’s Flash getting a far more pro-active role in the storyline AND the action which also thankfully cuts away a lot of the clumsiness the character had in the Whedon version without sacrificing any of the nerdy sass that nonetheless made him such a joy, while the connective tissue that ties Momoa’s Aquaman into his own subsequent standalone movie feels much stronger here, and his connection with his fellow League members feels less perfunctory too, but it’s Fisher’s Cyborg who TRULY reaps the benefits here, regaining a whole new key subplot and storyline that ties into a genuinely powerful tragic origin story, as well as a far more complicated and ultimately rewarding relationship with his scientist father, Silas Stone (the great Joe Morton). It’s also really nice to see Superman handled with the kind of skill we’d expect from the same director who did such a great job (fight me if you disagree) of bringing the character to life in two previous big screen instalments, as well as erasing the memory of that godawful digital moustache removal … similarly, it’s nice to see the new and returning supporting cast get more to do this time, from Morton and the ever-excellent J.K. Simmonds as fan favourite Gotham PD Commissioner Jim Gordon to Connie Nielsen as Diana’s mother, Queen Hippolyta of Themyscira and another unapologetic scene-stealing turn from Jeremy Irons as Batman’s faithful butler Alfred Pennyworth. Sure, it’s not a perfect movie – the unusual visual ratio takes some getting used to, while there’s A LOT of story to unpack here, and at a gargantuan FOUR HOURS there are times when the pacing somewhat lags, not to mention an overabundance of drawn-out endings (including a flash-forward to a potential apocalyptic future that, while evocative, smacks somewhat of overeager fan-service) that would put Lord of the Rings’ The Return of the King to shame, but original writer Chris Terrio’s reconstituted script is rich enough that there’s plenty to reward the more committed viewer, and the storytelling and character development is a powerful thing, while the action sequences are robust and thrilling (even if Snyder does keep falling back on his over-reliance on slow motion that seems to alienate some viewers), and the new score from Tom Holkenborg (who co-composed on BVS:DOJ) feels a far more natural successor than Danny Elfman’s theatrical compositions. The end result is no more likely to win fresh converts than Man of Steel or Batman Vs Superman, but it certainly stands up far better to a critical eye this time round, and feels like a far more natural progression for the saga too. Ultimately it’s more of an interesting tangential adventure given that Warner Bros seem to be stubbornly sticking to their original plans for the ongoing DCEU, but I can’t help hoping that they might have a change of heart in the future given just how much better the final product is than any of us had any right to expect …

9. SYNCHRONIC – writer-director duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are something of a creative phenomenon in the science-fiction and fantasy indie cinema scene, crafting films that ensnare the senses and engage the brain like few others. Subtly insidious conspiracy horror debut Resolution is a sneaky little chiller, while deeply original body horror Spring (the film that first got me into them) is weird, unsettling and surprisingly touching, but it was breakthrough sleeper hit The Endless, a nightmarish time-looping cosmic horror that thoroughly screws with your head, that really put them on the map. Needless to say it’s led them to greater opportunities heading into the future, and this is their first film to really reap the benefits, particularly by snaring a couple of genuine stars for its lead roles. Steve (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan) are paramedics working the night shift in New Orleans, which puts them on the frontlines when a new drug hits the streets, a dangerous concoction known as Synchronic that causes its users to experience weird localised fractures in time that frequently lead to some pretty outlandish deaths in adults, while teenage users often disappear entirely. As the situation worsens, the pair’s professional and personal relationships become increasingly strained, compounded by the fact that Steve is concealing his recent diagnosis of terminal cancer, before things come to a head when Dennis’ teenage daughter Brianna (Into the Badlands’ Ally Ioannides) vanishes under suspicious circumstances, and it becomes clear to Steve that she’s become unstuck in time … this is as mind-bendingly off-the-wall and spectacularly inventive as we’ve come to expect from Benson and Moorhead, another fantastically original slice of weirdness that benefits enormously from their exquisitely obsessive attention to detail and characteristically unsettling atmosphere of building dread, while their character development is second to none, benefitting their top-notch cast no end. Mackie is typically excellent, bringing compelling vulnerability to the role that makes it easy to root for him as he gets further out of his depth in this twisted temporal labyrinth, while Dornan invests Dennis with a painfully human fallibility, and Ioannides does a lot with very little real screen time in her key role as ill-fated Brianna. The time-bending sequences are suitably disorienting and disturbing, utilising pleasingly subtle use of visual effects to further mess with your head, and the overall mechanics of the drug and its effects are fiendishly crafted, while the directors tighten the screw of slowburn tension throughout, building to a suitably offbeat ending that’s as devastating as anything we’ve seen from them so far. Altogether this is another winning slice of genre-busting weirdness from a filmmaking duo who deserve continued success in the future, and I for one will be watching eagerly.

8. WITHOUT REMORSE – I’m a big fan of Tom Clancy, to me he was one of the ultimate escapist thriller writers, and whenever a new adaptation of one of his novels comes along I’m always front of the line to check it out. The Hunt For Red October is one of my favourite screen thrillers OF ALL TIME, while my very favourite Clancy adaptation EVER, the Jack Ryan TV series, is, in my opinion, one of the very best Original shows that Amazon have ever done. But up until now my VERY FAVOURITE Clancy creation, John Clark, has always remained in the background or simply absent entirely, putting in an appearance as a supporting character in only two of the movies, tantalising me with his presence but never more than a teaser. Well that’s all over now – after languishing in development hell since the mid-90s, the long-awaited adaptation of my favourite Clancy novel, the origin story of the top CIA black ops operative, has finally arrived, as well as a direct spin-off from distributor Amazon’s own Jack Ryan series. Michael B. Jordan plays John Kelly (basically Clark before he gained his more famous cover identity), a lethally efficient, highly decorated Navy SEAL whose life is turned upside down when a highly classified operation experiences deadly blowback as half of his team is assassinated in retaliation, while Kelly barely survives an attack in which his heavily pregnant wife is killed. With the higher-ups unwilling the muddy the waters while scrambling to control the damage, Kelly, driven by rage and grief, takes matters into his own hands, embarking on a violent personal crusade against the Russian operatives responsible, but as he digs deeper with the help of his former commanding officer, Lt. Commander Karen Greer (Queen & Slim’s Jodie Turner-Smith), and mid-level CIA hotshot Robert Ritter (Jamie Bell), it becomes clear that there’s a far more insidious conspiracy at work here … in the past the Clancy adaptations we’ve seen tend to be pretty tightly reined-in affairs, going for a PG-13 polish that maintains the intellectual fireworks but still tries to keep the violence clean and relatively family-friendly, but this was never going to be the case here – Clark has always been Jack Ryan’s dark shadow, Clancy’s righteous man without the moral restraint, and a PG-13 take never would have worked, so going for an unfettered R-rating is the right choice. Jordan’s Kelly/Clark is a blood-soaked force of nature, a feral dog let off the leash, bringing a brutal ferocity to the action that does the literary source proud, tempered by a wounded vulnerability that helps us to sympathise with the broken but still very human man behind the killer; Turner-Smith, meanwhile, regularly matches him in the physical stakes, jumping into the action with enthusiasm and looking damn fine doing it, but she also brings tight control and an air of pragmatic military professionalism that makes it easy to believe in her not only as an accomplished leader of fighting men but also as the daughter of Admiral Jim Greer, while Bell is arrogant and abrasive but ultimately still a good man as Ritter; Guy Pearce, meanwhile, brings his usual gravitas and quietly measured charisma to proceedings as US Secretary of Defence Thomas Clay, and Lauren London makes a suitably strong impression during her brief screen time to make her absence keenly felt as Kelly’s wife Pam. The action is intense, explosive and spectacularly executed, culminating in a particularly impressive drawn-out battle through a Russian apartment complex, while the labyrinthine plot is intricately crafted and unfolds with taut precision, but then the screenplay was co-written by Taylor Sheridan, who here reteams with Sicario 2 director Stefano Sollida, who’s also already proven to be a seasoned hand at this kind of thing, and the result is a tense, knuckle-whitening suspense thriller that pays magnificent tribute to the most compelling creation of one of the best authors in the genre. Amazon have signed up for more with already greenlit sequel Rainbow Six, and with this directly tied in with the Jack Ryan TV series too I can’t help holding out hope we just might get to see Jordan’s Clark backing John Krasinski’s Ryan up in the future …

7. RAYA & THE LAST DRAGON – with UK cinemas still closed I’ve had to live with seeing ALL the big stuff on my frustratingly small screen at home, but at least there’s been plenty of choice with so many of the big studios electing to either sell some of their languishing big projects to online vendors or simply release on their own streaming services. Thank the gods, then, for the House of Mouse following Warner Bros’ example and releasing their big stuff on Disney+ at the same time in those theatres that have reopened – this was one movie I was PARTICULARLY looking forward to, and if I’d had to wait and hope for the scheduled UK reopening to occur in mid-May I might have gone a little crazy watching everyone else lose it over something I still hadn’t seen. That said, it WOULD HAVE been worth the wait – coming across sort-of a bit like Disney’s long overdue response to Dreamworks’ AWESOME Kung Fu Panda franchise, this is a spellbinding adventure in a beautifully thought-out fantasy world heavily inspired by Southeast Asia and its rich, diverse cultures, bursting with red hot martial arts action and exotic Eastern mysticism and brought to life by a uniformly strong voice cast dominated by actors of Asian descent. It’s got a cracking premise, too – 500 years ago, the land of Kumandra was torn apart when a terrible supernatural force known as the Druun very nearly wiped out all life, only stopped by the sacrifice of the last dragons, who poured all their power and lifeforce into a mystical gem. But when the gem is broken and the pieces divided between the warring nations of Fang, Heart, Spine, Tail and Talon, the Druun return, prompting Raya (Star Wars’ Kelly Marie Tran), the fugitive princess of Heart, to embark on a quest to reunite the gem pieces and revive the legendary dragon Sisu in a desperate bid to vanquish the Druun once and for all. Moana director Don Hall teams up with Blindspotting helmer Carlos Lopez Estrada (making his debut in the big chair for Disney after helping develop Frozen), bringing to life a thoroughly inspired screenplay co-written by Crazy Rich Asians’ Adele Kim which is full to bursting with magnificent world-building, beautifully crafted characters and thrilling action, as well as the Disney prerequisites of playful humour and tons of heart and soul. Tran makes Raya an feisty and engaging heroine, tough, stubborn and a seriously kickass fighter, but with true warmth and compassion too, while Gemma Chan is icy cool but deep down ultimately kind of sweet as her bitter rival, Fang princess Namaari, and there’s strong support from Benedict Wong and Good Boys’ Izaac Wang as hard-but-soft Spine warrior Tong and youthful but charismatic Tail shrimp-boat captain Boun, two of the warm-hearted found family that Raya gathers on her travels. The true scene-stealer, however, is the always entertaining Awkwafina, bringing Sisu to life in wholly unexpected but thoroughly charming and utterly adorable fashion, a goofy, sassy and sweet-natured bundle of fun who grabs all the best laughs but also unswervingly champions the film’s core messages of peace, unity and acceptance in all things, something which Raya needs a lot of convincing to take to heart. Visually stunning, endlessly inventive, consistently thrilling and frequently laugh-out-loud funny, this is another solid gold winner once again proving that Disney can do this kind of stuff in their sleep, but it’s always most interesting when they really make the effort to create something truly special, and that’s just what they’ve done here. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the studio’s finest animated features in a good long while, and thoroughly deserving of your praise and attention …

6. THE MITCHELLS VS THE MACHINES – so what piece of animation, you might be asking, could POSSIBLY have won over Raya as my animated feature of the year so far? After all, it would have to be something TRULY special … but then, remember Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse? Back in 2018, that blew me away SO MUCH that it very nearly became my top animated feature of THE PAST DECADE (only JUST losing out, ultimately, to Dreamworks’ unstoppable How to Train Your Dragon trilogy). When I heard its creators, the irrepressible double act of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs), were going to be following that up with this anarchic screwball comedy adventure, I was VERY EXCITED INDEED, a fervour which was barely blunted when its release was, inevitably, indefinitely delayed thanks to the global pandemic, so when it finally released at the tail end of the Winter-Spring season I POUNCED. Thankfully my faith was thoroughly rewarded – this is an absolute riot from start to finish, a genuine cinematic gem I look forward to going back to for repeated viewings in the near future, just to soak up the awesomeness – it’s hilarious to a precision-crafted degree, brilliantly thought-out and SPECTACULARLY well-written by acclaimed Gravity Falls writer-director Mike Rianda (who also helms here), injecting the whole film with a gleefully unpredictable, irrepressibly irreverent streak of pure chaotic genius that makes it a affectionately endearing and utterly irresistible joyride from bonkers start to adorable finish. The central premise is pretty much as simple as the title suggests, the utterly dysfunctional family in question – father Rick (Danny McBride), born outdoorsman and utter technophobe, mother Linda (Maya Rudolph), much put-upon but unflappable even in the face of Armageddon, daughter Katie (Broad City co-creator Abbi Jacobson), tech-obsessed and growing increasingly estranged from her dad, and son Aaron (Rianda himself), a thoroughly ODD dinosaur nerd – become the world’s only hope after naïve tech mogul Mark Bowman (Eric Andre), founder of PAL Labs, inadvertently sets off a robot uprising. Cue a wild ride comedy of errors of EPIC proportions … this is just about the most fun I’ve had with a movie so far this year, an absolute riot throughout, but there’s far more to it than just a pile of big belly laughs, with the Mitchells all proving to be a lovable bunch of misfits who inspire just as much deep, heartfelt affection as they learn from their mistakes and finally overcome their differences, becoming a better, more loving family in the process, McBride and Jacobson particularly shining as they make our hearts swell and put a big lump in our throat even while they make us titter and guffaw, while the film has a fantastic larger than (virtual) life villain in PAL (Olivia Colman), the virtual assistant turned megalomaniacal machine intelligence spearheading this technological revolution. Much like its Spider-Man-shaped predecessor, this is also an absolutely STUNNING film, visually arresting and spectacularly inventive and bursting with neat ideas and some truly beautiful stylistic flair, frequently becoming a genuine work of cinematic art that’s as much a feast for the eyes as it is the intellect and, of course, the soul. Altogether then, this is definitely the year’s most downright GORGEOUS film so far, as well as UNDENIABLY its most FUN. Lord and Miller really have done it again.

5. P.G. PSYCHO GOREMAN – the year’s current undeniable top guilty pleasure has to be this fantastic weird, thoroughly over-the-top and completely OUT THERE black comedy cosmic horror that doesn’t so much riff on the works of HP Lovecraft as throw them in a blender, douse them with maple syrup and cayenne pepper and then hurl the sloppy results to the four winds. On paper it sounds like a family-friendly cutesy comedy take on Call of Cthulu et al, but trust me, this sure ain’t one for the kids – the latest indie horror offering from Steven Kostanski, co-creator of the likes of Manborg, Father’s Day and The Void, this is one of the weirdest movies I’ve seen in years, but it’s also one of the most gleefully funny, playing itself entirely for yucks (frequently LITERALLY). Mimi (Nita Josee-Hanna) and Luke (Owen Myre) are a two small-town Canadian kids who dig a big hole of their backyard, accidentally releasing the Arch-Duke of Nightmares (Matthew Ninaber and the voice of Steven Vlahos), an ancient, god-tier alien killing machine who’s been imprisoned for aeons in order to protect the universe from his brutal crusade of death and destruction. To their parents’ dismay, Mimi decides to keep him, renaming him Psycho Goreman (or “P.G.” for short) and attempting to curb his superpowered murderous impulses so she can have a new playmate. But the monster’s original captors, the Templars of the Planetary Alliance, have learned of his escape, sending their most powerful warrior, Pandora (Kristen McCulloch), to destroy him once and for all. Yup, this movie is just as loony tunes as it sounds – Kostanski injects the film with copious amounts of his own outlandish, OTT splatterpunk extremity, bringing us a riotous cavalcade of bizarrely twisted creatures and mutations (brought to life through some deliciously disgusting prosthetic effects work) and a series of wonderfully off-kilter (not to mention frequently off-COLOUR) darkly comic skits and escapades, while the sense of humour is pretty bonkers but also generously littered with nuggets of genuine sharply observed genius. The cast, although made up almost entirely of unknowns, is thoroughly game, and the kids particularly impress, especially Josee-Hanna, who plays Mimi like a flamboyant, mercurial miniature psychopath whose zinger-delivery is clipped, precise and downright hilarious throughout. There are messages of love conquering all and the power of family, both born and made, buried somewhere in there too, but ultimately this is just 90 minutes of wonderful weirdness that’s sure to melt your brain but still leave you with a big dumb green when it’s all over. Which is all we really want from a movie like this, right?

4. SPACE SWEEPERS – all throughout the pandemic and the interminable lockdowns, Netflix have been a consistent blessing to those of us who’ve been craving the kind of big budget blockbusters we have (largely) been unable to get at the cinema. Some of my top movies of 2020 were Netflix Originals, and they’ve continued the trend into 2021, having dropped some choice cuts on us over the past four months, with some REALLY impressive offerings still to come as we head into the summer season (roll on, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead!). In the meantime, my current Netflix favourite of the year so far is this phenomenal milestone of Korean cinema, lauded as the country’s first space blockbuster, which certainly went big instead of going home. Writer-director Jo Sung-hee (A Werewolf Boy, Phantom Detective) delivers big budget thrills and spills with a bombastic science-fiction adventure cast in the classic Star Wars mould, where action, emotion and fun characters count for more than an admittedly simplistic but still admirably archetypical and evocative plot – it’s 2092, and the Earth has become a toxic wasteland ruined by overpopulation and pollution, leading the wealthy to move into palatial orbital habitats in preparation for the impending colonisation of Mars, while the poor and downtrodden are packed into rotting ghetto satellites facing an uncertain future left behind to fend for themselves, and the UTS Corporation jealously guard the borders between rich and poor, presided over by seemingly benevolent but ultimately cruel sociopathic genius CEO James Sullivan (Richard Armitage). Eking out a living in-between are the space sweepers, freelance spaceship crews who risk life and limb by cleaning up dangerous space debris to prevent it from damaging satellites and orbital structures. The film focuses on the crew of sweeper vessel Victory, a ragtag quartet clearly inspired by the “heroes” of Cowboy Bebop – Captain Jang (The Handmaiden’s Kim Tae-ri), a hard-drinking ex-pirate with a mean streak and a dark past, ace pilot Kim Tae-ho (The Battleship Island’s Song Joong-ki), a former child-soldier with a particularly tragic backstory, mechanic Tiger Park (The Outlaws’ Jin Seon-Kyu), a gangster from Earth living in exile in orbit, and Bubs (a genuinely flawless mocapped performance from A Taxi Driver’s Yoo Hae-jin), a surplus military robot slumming it as a harpooner so she can earn enough for gender confirmation. They’re a fascinating bunch, a mercenary band who never think past their next paycheque, but there’s enough good in them that when redemption comes knocking – in the form of Kang Kot-nim (newcomer Park Ye-rin), a revolutionary prototype android in the form of a little girl who may hold the key to bio-technological ecological salvation – they find themselves answering the call in spite of their misgivings. The four leads are exceptional (as is their young charge), while Armitage makes for a cracking villain, delivering subtle, restrained menace by the bucketload every time he’s onscreen, and there’s excellent support from a fascinating multinational cast who perform in a refreshingly broad variety of languages. Jo delivers spectacularly on the action front, wrangling a blistering series of adrenaline-fuelled and explosive set-pieces that rival anything George Lucas or JJ Abrams have sprung on us this century, while the visual effects are nothing short of astounding, bringing this colourful, eclectic and dangerous universe to vibrant, terrifying life; indeed, the world-building here is exceptional, creating an environment you’ll feel sorely tempted to live in despite the pitfalls. Best of all, though, there’s tons of heart and soul, the fantastic found family dynamic at the story’s heart winning us over at every turn. Ultimately, while you might come for the thrills and spectacle, you’ll stay for these wonderful, adorable characters and their compelling tale. An undeniable triumph.

3. JUDAS & THE BLACK MESSIAH – I’m a little fascinated by the Black Panther Party, I find them to be one of the most intriguing elements of Black History in America, but outside of documentaries I’ve never really seen a feature film that’s truly done the movement justice, at least until now. It’s become a major talking point of the Awards Season, and it’s easy to see why – director Shaka King is a protégé of Spike Lee, and together with up-and-coming co-screenwriter Wil Berson he’s captured the fire and fervour of the Party and their firebrand struggle for racial liberation through force of arms, as well as a compelling portrait of one of their most important figures, Fred Hampton, the Chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the BPP and a powerful political activist who could have become the next Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya is magnificent in the role, effortlessly holding your attention in every scene with his laconic ease and deceptively friendly manner, barely hinting at the zealous fire blazing beneath the surface, but the film’s true focus is the man who brought him down, William O’Neal, a fellow Panther and FBI informant placed in the Chapter to infiltrate the movement and find a way for the US Government to bring down what they believed to be one of the country’s greatest internal threats. Lakeith Stanfield (Sorry to Bother You, Knives Out) delivers a suitably complex performance as O’Neal, perfectly embodying a very clever but also very desperate man walking a constant tightrope to maintain his cover in some decidedly wary company, but there’s never any real sense that he’s playing the villain, Stanfield largely garnering sympathy from the viewer as we’re shamelessly made to root for him, especially once he starts falling for the very ideals he’s trying to subvert – it’s a true star-making performance, and he even holds his own playing opposite Kaluuya himself. The rest of the cast are equally impressive, Dominique Fishback (Project Power, The Deuce) particularly holding our attention as Hampton’s fiancée and fellow Panther Akua Njeri, as does Jesse Plemmons as O’Neal’s idealistic but sympathetic FBI handler Roy Mitchell, while Martin Sheen is the film’s nominal villain in a chillingly potent turn as J. Edgar Hoover. This is an intense and thrilling film, powered by a tense atmosphere of pregnant urgency and righteous fury, but while there are a few grittily realistic set pieces, the majority of the fireworks on display are performance based, the cast giving their all and King wrestling a potent and emotionally resonant, inescapably timely history lesson that informs without ever slipping into preachy exposition, leaving an unshakable impression long after the credits have rolled. This doesn’t just earn all the award-winning kudos it gained, it deserved A LOT MORE recognition that it got, and if this were a purely critical rundown list I’d have to put it in the top spot. As it is I’m monumentally enamoured of this film, and I can’t sing its praises enough …

2. RUN, HIDE, FIGHT – the biggest surprise hit for me so far this year was this wicked little indie suspense thriller from writer-director Kyle Rankin (Night of the Living Deb), which snuck in under the radar but is garnering an impressive reputation as a future cult sleeper hit. Critics have been less kind, but the subject matter is a pretty thorny issue, and if handled the wrong way it could have been in very poor taste indeed. Thankfully Rankin has crafted a corker here, initially taking time to set the scene and welcome the players before throwing us headfirst into an unbelievably tense but also unsettlingly believable situation – a small town American high school becomes the setting for a fraught siege when a quartet of disturbed students take several of their classmates hostage at gunpoint, creating a social media storm in the process as they encourage the capture of the crisis on phone cameras. While the local police gather outside, the shooters discover another threat from within the school throwing spanners in the works – Zoe Hull (Alexa & Katie’s Isabel May), a seemingly nondescript girl who happens to be the daughter of former marine scout sniper Todd (Thomas Jane). She’s wound pretty tight after the harrowing death of her mother to cancer, fuelled by grief and conditioned by her father’s training, so she’s determined to get her friends and classmates out of this nightmare, no matter what. Okay, so the premise reads like Die Hard in a school, but this is a very different beast, played for gritty realism and shot with unshowy cinema-verité simplicity, Rankin cranking up the tension beautifully but refusing to play to his audience any more than strictly necessary, drip-feeding the thrills to maximum effect but delivering some harrowing action nonetheless. The cast are top-notch too, Jane delivering a typically subtle, nuanced turn while Treat Williams is likeably stoic as world-weary but dependable local Sherriff Tarsey, Rhada Mitchell intrigues as the matter-of-fact phantom of Zoe’s mum, Jennifer, that she’s concocted to help her through her mourning, Olly Sholotan is sweetly geeky as her best friend Lewis, and Eli Brown raises genuine goosebumps as an all-too-real teen psychopath in the role of terrorist ringleader Tristan Voy. The real beating heart and driving force of the film, though, is May, intense, barely restrained and all but vibrating with wounded fury, perfectly believable as the diminutive high school John McClane who defies expectations to become a genuine force to be reckoned with, as far as I’m concerned one of this year’s TOP female protagonists. Altogether this is a cracking little thriller, a precision-crafted little action gem that nonetheless raises some troubling questions and treats its subject matter with utmost care and respect, a film that’s destined for major cult classic status, and I can’t recommend it enough.

1. NOBODY – do you love the John Wick movies but you just wish they took themselves a bit less seriously? Well fear not, because Derek Kolstad has delivered fantastically on that score, the JW screenwriter mashing his original idea up with the basic premise of the Taken movies (former government spook/assassin turned unassuming family man is forced out of retirement and shit gets seriously trashed as a result) and injecting a big dollop of gallows humour. This time he’s teamed up with Ilya Naishuller, the stone-cold lunatic who directed the deliriously insane but also thoroughly brilliant Hardcore Henry, and the results are absolutely unbeatable, a pitch perfect jet black action comedy bursting with neat ideas, wonderfully offbeat characters and ingenious plot twists. Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk is perfect casting as Hutch Mansell, the aforementioned ex-“Auditor”, a CIA hitman who grew weary of the lifestyle and quit to find some semblance of normality with his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen), with whom he’s had two kids. Ultimately, he seems to have “overcompensated”, and his life has stagnated, Hutch following a autopiloted day-to-day routine that’s left him increasingly unfulfilled … then fate intervenes and a series of impulsive choices see him falling back on his old ways while defending a young woman from drunken thugs on a late night bus ride. Problem is, said lowlifes work for the Russian Mob, specifically Yulian Kuznetsov (Leviathan’s Aleksei Serebryakov), a Bratva boss charged with guarding the Obshak, who must exact brutal vengeance in order to save face. Cue much bloody violence and entertaining chaos … Kolstad can do this sort of thing in his sleep, but his writing married with Naishuller’s singularly BONKERS vision means that the anarchy is dialled right up to eleven, while the gleefully dark sense of humour shot through makes the occasional surreality and bitingly satirical observation on offer all the more exquisite. Odenkirk is a low-key joy throughout, initially emasculated and pathetic but becoming more comfortable in his skin as he reconnects with his old self, while Serebryakov hams things up spectacularly, chewing the scenery with aplomb; Nielsen, meanwhile, brings her characteristic restrained classiness to proceedings, Christopher Lloyd and the RZA are clearly having the time of their lives as, respectively, Hutch’s retired FBI agent father David and fellow ex-spook half-brother Harry, and there’s a wonderfully game cameo from the incomparable Colin Salmon as Hutch’s former handler, the Barber. Altogether then, this is the perfect marriage of two fantastic worlds – an action-packed thrill ride as explosively impressive as John Wick, but also a wickedly subversive laugh riot every bit as blissfully inventive as Hardcore Henry, and undeniably THE BEST MOVIE I’ve seen so far this year. Sure, there’s some pretty heavyweight stuff set to (FINALLY) come out later this year, but this really will take some beating …

#movies 2021 #zack snyder's justice league #synchronic #synchronic movie #without remorse #raya and the last dragon #the mitchells vs the machines #pg psycho goreman #psycho goreman #space sweepers #judas and the black messiah #run hide fight #nobody #nobody movie

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weekendwarriorblog · 3 years

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The Weekend Warrior 10/1/21: VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE, THE ADDAMS FAMILY II, THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK, TITANE, MAYDAY, THE JESUS MUSIC

Yeah, so I haven’t had the time over the past couple weeks to write a column, and I kind of hate that fact, especially since I’m coming up on a pretty major milestone for me writing a weekly box office column and reviewing movies. In fact, that milestone comes next week! And once again, I’m struggling to get through the movies I was hoping to watch and write about this week, because I’ve been out of town and once again, very busy over the weekend. Let’s see how far I get...

Before we get to this week’s wide releases, I’m excited to say that my local arthouse movie theater, The Metrograph, is finally reopening for in-person screenings, and they’re kicking things off with a 4k restoration of Andrez Zulawski’s 1981 thriller, Possession, starring Sam Neill and Isabell Adjani, who won a Best Actress prize at Cannes for her performance in the film. I actually saw this at the Metrograph a few years back, and Metrograph Pictures, the distribution arm of the company is now distributing the 4k restoration. There’s a lot of exciting things ahead at Metrograph, including an upcoming four-film Clint Eastwood retrospective, including White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) and A Perfect World (1991) this Friday. Also, Lingua Franca director Isabel Sandoval will be showing her fantastic film from 2020 (a rare chance to see it in a theater and I’ll be there!) as well as program a number of other favorites of hers. Sunday will have screenings of Ingmar Berman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) in its full four plus hour glory, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) and John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994).. In other words, the Metrograph is back!

Moving over to the weekend’s three wide releases, the first one up being Sony’s VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE (Sony Pictures) with Tom Hardy returning as Eddie Brock aka Venom, joined by Woody Harrelson as the psychotic symbiote, Carnage. Taking over the directing reins is Andy Serkis, who has only directed two other movies, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle and Breathe, but as an actor, he’s been heavily involved with the CG VFX (and performance capture) needed to bring the characters in this Marvel anti-hero movie to life.

Venom has been one of Spider-Man’s most popular villains and sometimes allies for quite a few decades now, starting out life as a cool black costume Spider-Man found on a strange planet during the first “Secret Wars,” which turned out to be an alien symbiote that had malicious intentions. Spider-Man got the costume off of him but it then linked up with Eddie Brock, a sad-sack journalist whose emotions drove the alien symbiote to become the Venom we known and (mostly) love, thanks to one Todd McFarlane. Venom continued to play a large part in the Spider-Man books before getting his own comics, and not before a super-villain was created for him in Cletus Kasady, a vicious serial killer whose infection by the symbiote turns him into Carnage. And that’s who Harrelson is playing.

Being a sequel, we do have some basis to go on, although the original Venom movie, released in early October 2018, also arrived at a time when it was only the second time the character of Venom was brought to the big screen -- the first time being Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, in which the character was received without much love as Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And yet, Venom did great, opening with $80.2 million and grossing $213 million domestically, which is more than enough to greenlight a sequel. (It made over double that amount overseas, too.) For comparison, the Wolverine prequel opened with $85 million but at the beginning of summer, so it quickly tailed away with other movies coming out after it. Venom: Let There Be Carnage has to worry about the new James Bond opening a week later, so it very likely could be a one-and-done, opening decently but quickly dropping down as other big movies are released in October (basically one a week).

I’ve already seen the movie, and by the time you read this, reviews will already be up --including my own at Below the Line. Social media reactions seem to not be so bad though, so maybe it’ll get better reviews than its predecessor, which was trashed by critics, receiving only a 30% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But if you look at the fan ratings, they’re higher with 81%, although it’s hard not to be

I’m thinking that bearing COVID in mind and the law of depreciation since the previous movie, Venom: Let There Be Carnage will probably be good for around $50 million this weekend, maybe a little more, but however it’s received, I expect it to drop significantly next week, though a total domestic gross of $135 to 140 million seems reasonable.

Another strong sequel to kick off October is the animated THE ADDAMS FAMILY II (MGM), which is following up the 2019 hit for MGM/UA Releasing with most of the voice cast returning, including Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloe Grace Moretz, and Finn Wolfhard, as well as Nick Kroll, Snoop Dogg, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, and Bette Midler voicing the popular characters from the New Yorker cartoons, a popular ‘60s TV series, and two Barry Sonnenfeld movies from the ‘90s.

The 2019 animated film was a pretty solid hit for the newly-launched UA Releasing, grossing $100 million domestic after a $30.3 million opening, making it one of MGM’s biggest hits since it was restructured under UA and became its own distributor again. Who knows what’s going to happen with Amazon’s plans on buying MGM and whether the latter will remain a distribution wing, but MGM still has a number of movies out this year that likely will be awards contenders. But that doesn’t mean much for The Addams Family II, which will try to get some of those people who paid to see the original movie in theaters back to see the sequel… and if they’re not going to theaters, MGM is once again offering the movie day-and-date on VOD much like they did with last year’s Bill and Ted Face the Music, which opened much earlier in the pandemic (late august, 2020), so it far fewer options to see it in theaters compared to this animated sequel.

It’s highly doubtful that The Addams Family II was going to open anywhere near to $30 million even if there wasn’t a pandemic, and it wasn’t on VOD just because MGM just doesn’t seem to be marketing the movie as well as its predecessor. You can blame COVID if you want, but it’s also the fact they’re distributing the company’s first James Bond movie in six years, No Time To Die, on their own vs. through another distributor, ala the last few Daniel Craig Bonds. But we’ll talk more about that next week, since that’s going to be an important movie to help cover MGM’s expenses for the rest of 2021. (I haven’t had a chance to see this yet, but it’s embargoed until Friday, so wouldn’t be able to get a review into the column regardless.)

We’ve seen quite a few family hits over the past few months even when the movies were already on streaming/VOD, but parents are probably being a bit more careful with kids back in school, many younger kids still not vaccinated, and the Delta variant still not quite under control. Because of those factors, I think The Addams Family II is more likely to do somewhere between $15 and 18 million its opening weekend, maybe more on the lower side.

Third up is THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK (New Line/WB), David Chase’s prequel to his hit HBO series, The Sopranos, which went off the air in 2004 but still finds fans on the new HBO Max streamer. Ironically, this prequel will air on the streamer at the same time as it's getting a theatrical release, which probably won't be a very tough choice for fans.

Chase has reunited with director Alan Taylor, who won a Primetime Emmy for his work on the show in 2007 before moving onto other popular shows like HBO's Game of Thrones. Taylor has had a bit of a rough career in film, though, having directed Marvel Studios’ sequel, Thor: The Dark World, a movie that wasn't received very well although there were rumors that Taylor butted heads with the producers and maybe didn't even finish the movie. He went on to direct Terminator Genesys, which honestly, I can't remember if it was the worst Terminator movie, but it was pretty bad.

What's interesting is that because this is a prequel set in the '70s and '80s, none of the actors from the show appear on it, but it does star Alessandro Nivola, a great actor in one of his meatiest roles for a studio movie. It also introduces Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini (who played Tony Soprano, if you didn't know), playing the teenage Tony, plus it has great roles for the likes of Jon Bernthal (as Tony's father), Vera Farmiga (playing Tony's mother), Corey Stoll (playing the younger "Junior” Soprano), and Lesile Odom Jr, as the Sopranos key adversary, even though he ends up coming across like the good guy of the movie. It also stars Billy Magnussen, who oddly, also has a key role in next week's No Time to Die.

I'm sure there's quite a bit of interest in seeing where Tony came from and to learn more about his family, many who were dead long before the events of the HBO show, but will that be enough to get them into theaters when they already have HBO? I already reviewed the movie for Below the Line, and reviews are generally positive, which might get people more interested in this prequel.

As with most of Warner Bros’ movies this year, Many Saints will also debut on HBO Max and unlike some of the studio’s other 2021 offerings, it will actually make more sense to watch this one on the streamer since that’s how most people watched The Sopranos. That seems like a killer for Many Saints, and it’s likely to keep it opening under $10 million, where it might have done better on a different weekend (like sometime over the last two weeks).

This is what I have this weekend’s top 10 looking like:

1. Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Sony) - $50.4 million N/A

2. The Addams Family II (MGM/UA Releasing) - $16.5 million N/A

3. The Many Saints of Newark (New Line/WB) - $9 million N/A

4. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Marvel/Disney) - $7.5 million -44%

5. Dear Evan Hansen (Universal) - $4.1 million -45%

6. Free Guy (20th Century/Disney) - $3.3 million -30%

7. Jungle Cruise (Disney) - $1.1 million -35%

8. Candyman (Universal) - $1.3 million -48%

9. Cry Macho (Warner Bros.) - $1 million -52%

10. Malignant (Warner Bros.) - .7 million -53%

Opening in select cities is French filmmaker Julia (Raw) Ducournau’s TITANE (Neon), the genre thriller that won this year’s coveted Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It stars Agathe Rouselle as a young woman who has an interesting relationship with automobiles, but she also has psychotic tendencies that leaves a trail of bodies behind her. On the run, she decides to pretend she’s the missing son of a fireman (Vincent Lindon), who has been missing for 10 years, and things just get weirder from there.

I honestly wasen’t sure what to expect from this although I do remember walking out of Ducournau’s cannibal movie, Raw, just because it was so gross, even though so many of my colleagues and friends swear by the movie, and this one, for that matter. Sure, there’s a certain “prove it” factor to me watching a movie that wins the Palme D’Or, because it’s very rare that I like the movies that do win that benchmark cinema award.

After a flashback to Agathe’s character Alexia when she was an obstinate young girl kicking the back seat of her father as he’s driving. They crash and she’s forced to get surgery that puts an odd looking piece of metal in her head. Decades later, she seems to be a pseudo-stripper at weird punk rock car show -- I guess they do those things different in France -- and hooking up with a fellow “model” afterwards. Agathe is actually a very popular model/dancer but when one fan gets too grabby, she pulls a knitting needle out of her hair and stabs it through his ear, killing him. Oh, yeah, she then has sex with a car and seemingly gets pregnant, but that only happens later. First, she goes on a bit of a killing spree and then goes on a run and decides that by strapping up her breasts and breaking her nose, she can pass off this fire captain’s son… and it works!

So the second half deals with acting great Vincent Lindon’s absolutely bonkers steroid-addicted man who seems to be sexually attracted to his own son, and most of his fellow firefighters knows that he’s gay but in the closet, but I’m honestly not sure what that matters. He’s a pretty disgusting character whose 70-year-old ass we see way too much of, and even those who might find Rouselle to be quite fetching, there’s a certain point where her nudity is not alluring but quite horrifying.

Oh, and at this time, Alexia (or Adrien, as she’s now going) has also gotten significantly pregnant, but it’s not a normal pregnancy because what should be milk from her breasts seems to some sort of motor oil. That’s because she FUCKED A CAR earlier in the movie!!! What do you expect when you fuck a car and don’t use protection, girlie? The fact Alexia/Adrien is trying to hide the fact she’s a pregnant woman from a station full of men isn’t even particularly disturbing. The part that really got me was when she broke her own nose to pass off as this guy’s son -- I actually had to look away for that part.

Listen I’m no prude, and I think I can handle most things in terms of horror and gore, but Titane just annoyed me, because it felt like Ms Ducournau was doing a lot of what we see more for shock value than to actually drive the story forward. There just doesn’t seem to be much point to any of it, and once the movie gets to the firehouse, and we see her interaction (as a young man) with her “father” and his colleagues, it just gets more grueling.

It’s as if Ducournau had watched a lot of movies by the likes of Cronenberg or David Lynch, or more likely Nicolas Refn or Lars von Trier, and thought, “I could be just as strange and horrific as those men… let’s see what people think of this.” And way too many people fell for it, including the Cannes jury. While I normally would approve of any good body horror movie, especially one with cinematography, score and musical selections as good as this one, I doubt I’d ever want to watch this movie again. And therefore, I don’t think I can recommend this movie to anyone either, at least no one I want to remain my friend.

As far as the movie’s box office, NEON is opening the movie in 562 theaters to build on buzz from various film festivals, including the New York Film Festival earlier this week. I think it should be good for half a million this weekend, although maybe it'll surprise me like NEON's release of Parasite a few years back. I just don't see this getting into the top 10 but maybe just outside it.

And then we have a few more movies that I got screeners for but just couldn’t find the time to watch, but might do so once I finish this verdammt column.

The faith-based doc THE JESUS MUSIC (Lionsgate) by the Erwin Brothers (I Can Only Imagine, I Still Believe) takes a look at the rise of Christian Contemporary Music through artists like Amy Grant and Stryper and everything in between, featuring lots of interviews of the artists’ trials and triumphs. Even though there isn’t much CCM I ever listen to, I’m still kind of curious about this one, since I generally like music docs and this is guaranteed not to be the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll of most of them. I have no idea how wide Lionsgate intends to release this but it certainly can be fairly wide, because the Erwins have delivered at least one giant hit for Lionsgate, and I Still Believe may have been another one if not for the pandemic. It actually opened on March 13, just days before movie theaters shut down across the country, so it's little surprise it only made $7 million domestic. That said, the acts in this one have a lot of fans, and if Lionsgate does release The Jesus Music into 1,000 theaters or so (which is very doable), then I would expect it would make between $1 and 2 million, which would be enough to break into the Top 10.

I haven't seen any of the movies based on Anna Todd's YA romance novels but the third of them, AFTER WE FELL, will play in about 1,311 theaters on Thursday i.e. tonight through Fathom Events, and may or may not continue through the weekend. These movies just kind of show up, and again, having not seen any of them, I'm not sure what kind of audience they have, but this one stars Josephine Langford and Hero Fiennes, as well as Stephen Moyer, Mira Sorvino and Arielle Kebbel with Castille Landon directing.

Grace Van Patten (Under the Silver Lake) stars in Karen Cinorre’s action-fantasy film MAYDAY (Magnolia), playing Ana, a young woman who is transported to a “dreamlike and dangerous” coastline where she joins a female army in a never-ending war where women lure men to their deaths. It also stars Mia Goth, Havana Rose Liu, Soko, Théodore Pellerin and Juliette Lewis. It will be in theaters and On Demand this Friday.

The great Tim Blake Nelson stars in Potsy Ponciroli’s action-Western OLD HENRY (Shout! Studios/Hideout) about a widowed farmer and son who take in an injured man with a satchel full of cash only to have to fend off a posse who come after the man, claiming to be the law. Not sure who to trust, the farmer has to use his gun skills to defend his home and the stranger.

The romantic-comedy FALLING FOR FIGARO (IFC Films) is the new movie from Australian filmmaker Ben Lewin (The Sessions), who I’ve interviewed a few times, and he’s a really nice chap. This one stars Danielle Macdonald, Hugh Skinner, and Joanna Lumley, and it will be in theaters and On Demand this Friday. This rom-com is set in the world of opera singing competitions with Macdonald playing Millie, a brilliant young fund manager who decides to chase her dream of being an opera singer in the Scottish Highlands. She begins vocal training lessons with a former opera diva, played by Lumley, where she meets Max, a young man also training for that competition. Could love blossom? This actually sounds like my kind of movie, so I’ll definitely try to watch soon.

The second season of “Welcome to Blumhouse” the horror movie anthology kicks off on Amazon Prime Video on Friday with the first two movies, Maritte Lee Go’s Black as Night (which I’ve seen) and Gigi Saul Guerrero’s Bingo Night (which I haven’t), and actually I’ll have an interview with Ms. Go over at Below the Line possibly later this week. The former stars Ashja Cooper as a teen girl living in Louisiana who has a bad experience with homeless vampires, along with her best friend (Fabrizio Guido).

Also, Antoine Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal’s remake of the Danish film THE GUILTY will begin streaming on Netflix starting Friday after premiering at TIFF a few weeks back. I never got around to reviewing it, but it’s pretty good, maybe a little better than the original movie but essentially the same. I’d definitely recommend it if you like Jake, because he’s definitely terrific in it.

Also hitting Netflix this week is Juana Macias' SOUNDS LIKE LOVE (Netflix), a Spanish language romance movie that (guess) I haven't seen!

A few other movies I didn’t get to this week, include:

STOP AND GO (Decal) VAL (Dread) BLUSH (UA Releasing) RUNT (1091 Pictures)

Next week, it’s not time for James Bond, it’s time for James Bond to die… no, wait�� there is NO TIME TO DIE! Also, a very, very special anniversary for the Weekend Warrior….

#The Weekend Warrior #Venom: Let There Be Carnage #Many Saints of Newark #Addams Family II #movies #review #box office #reviews #The Jesus Music #Titane

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the-desolated-quill · 4 years

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The Mandalorian Represents Everything I Hate About Disney - Quill’s Scribbles

This post contains spoilers for the first two episodes, if you care about that sort of thing.

Yes, after four months of wallowing in a depressive funk, your lord and saviour the Desolated Quill has returned to (hopefully) start posting semi-regularly again. And what better way to mark my return than by kicking my favourite dead horse Disney.

So what have you been doing since this coronavirus epidemic started? I for one have been spending most of the time trying and failing to persuade my mother not to get a Disney+ subscription. The rise of streaming TV services represent the very height of greed and stupidity within the film and television industry. See it’s not enough for these studios to share their profits with the likes of Netflix and Amazon. Rampant capitalism dictates that they must have every conceivable penny imaginable, hence why we’re seeing the slow gating off of content and the emergence of new streaming platforms like Disney+, Starzplay, DC Universe, HBO Max, Apple TV and YouTube. Yes, even Youtube has a subscription service now. It’s like that episode of Oprah Winfrey. You get a streaming service, you get a streaming service, you get a streaming service, EVERYBODY gets a streaming service! Except the problem is that the reason why Netflix and Amazon took off was because it was convenient to get all of our entertainment from one location. Now with content spread out across multiple platforms, customers are having to pick and choose who to subscribe to as only the very rich can afford to subscribe to everyone. It’s ostensibly a televisual arms race coupled with classism. Make no mistake, the motivation behind the rise of streaming services is not motivated by customer satisfaction nor artistic merit, but rather corporate greed. And Disney is by far the worst offender. There is literally not a single reason why they couldn’t have kept their stuff on Netflix. The only reason Disney+ exists is so that they can get their grubby mitts on even more money than they already have (which is quite a lot).

So my mum got a Disney+ subscription because she never fucking listens to a single word I say and we ended up sitting down to watch the first two episodes of The Mandalorian. The new Star Wars TV spinoff created by Iron Man director Jon Favreau set in-between Return of The Jedi and The Force Awakens.

As much as I have complaints about the way Disney have handled the Star Wars license, I confess I was curious and dare I say even excited about The Mandalorian when it was first announced. I’ve gone on record to say that I didn’t want nor care about a sequel trilogy because, as far as I was concerned, Return Of The Jedi was a perfect ending to the Skywalker saga and we didn’t need to see what happened next. That’s like wondering what happens after Cinderella married Prince Charming. We don’t need to see it. They lived happily ever after. The end. The spinoffs, on the other hand, including the Anthology films and The Mandalorian, I was much more excited for because it was an opportunity to tell different kinds of stories and explore areas of the Star Wars universe we wouldn’t normally get to see in the main films. If the Star Wars franchise has to be expanded upon, I’d rather it was like this. Lets move away from the Skywalkers and the Jedi and concentrate on other stuff. So a space western set after the original trilogy depicting a lone bounty hunter trying to make ends meet after the fall of the Empire was very appealing to me.

Sadly that’s not what I got.

I’ll just be blunt. I saw the first two episodes of The Mandalorian and I didn’t like it very much. It’s not bad as such. It’s competently made. I’ve seen some behind the scenes videos and there’s clearly a lot of talented people working hard on this show. That being said, the story of The Mandalorian is... well... kind of rubbish.

So lets talk about it, shall we?

As far as I’m concerned there are three reasons why The Mandalorian doesn’t work. The first is the complete lack of tension. It’s a problem that’s plagued Star Wars since The Phantom Menace. Despite all the challenges and obstacles that are thrown at the characters, it never seems to affect them or even pose much of a threat. We saw that with Anakin Skywalker in the prequels and Rey in the sequels, and it’s the same here. The Mandalorian is this amazing dude who’s skilled and awesome and the bestest fighter ever. He can take out all these bad guys single-handedly and can do all these cool things. Except none of that is interesting. It’s boring. People like to defend Rey saying she’s no worse than Luke Skywalker, but that’s not true because, unlike Rey, Luke isn’t perfect. He struggles, he makes mistakes, and he grows and evolves over time. Rey is just this perfect woman who can do no wrong and who can pull any random superpower out of her arse for the sake of plot convenience. It’s just bad writing. While The Mandalorian never gets quite as bad as that, there does seem to be this obsession with making this awesome, cool dude, but that ends up coming at the cost of any tension or threat the story could have.

In the first episode, we see his bounty explore his ship. This could have been an opportunity to create some tension. Maybe he could try and sabotage the ship. Or try to escape. Complicate matters for the Mandalorian. But no. The Mandalorian knew what the guy was doing and instantly recaptures him. Same goes for a scene later on when the Mandalorian and some killer robot has to fight a whole army of mercenaries. How are they going to get out of this? Very easily it turns out. Not only do they beat them within a couple of minutes, the mercenaries are also clearly the worst shots ever. The robot is like seven foot tall and moving at the speed of frozen treacle, and yet they don’t manage to land a single hit on the guy. Where’s the suspense? Where’s the danger? By the end of the first episode, I was just bored senseless.

Which leads me to my second biggest problem. The total lack of originality. Is it really too much to ask for someone to actually come up with their own fucking ideas? Literally everything in The Mandalorian is basically nicked wholesale from other, better Star Wars films. The first two planets we visit in episode one are basically variations on Tatooine with the same architecture and everything. There’s even that eye thing that pops out of the door like in Jabba’s Palalce in Return Of The Jedi. Then, to add insult to injury, we then end up on the actual Tatooine (or at least what I assume is the actual Tatooine. I mean there are Jawas). The Mandalorian is like this Frankenstein assembly of Star Wars memorabilia. Everything has been taken from other films when it makes no sense to do so. The Mandalorian freezes his bounties in carbonite, except that was a process specific to Cloud City. Darth Vader improvised a trap using what was at hand to try and catch Luke. He wasn’t even sure if Luke would survive the freezing process, hence why they tested it on Han Solo first. The only reason it’s here in The Mandalorian is for fanwank purposes. Same goes for the stormtroopers. Why the fuck are there stormtroopers?! Remember where we are in the Star Wars story. The Empire has fallen and the New Republic is taking over. Imperialists are going to be pretty unpopular, wouldn’t you say? So why the fuck would you have stormtroopers wandering around in full armour out in the open? It makes zero sense. Even the killer robot is copied whole sale from IG-88 from Empire Strikes Back. Why don’t you come up with your own killer robot design?

Then there’s this little shit:

Yeah, I kind of knew this was coming because I’ve seen the GIFs circulating on Tumblr beforehand, which kind of ruined the ending of the first episode somewhat. But even if I didn’t know this was coming, the ‘twist’ still wouldn’t work because it’s not really a twist if you think about it. What actually happens? The Mandalorian finds the Child and it’s an eighty year old gremlin. Okay. So what? The only reason it’s ‘shocking’ is because it vaguely looks like Yoda. Other than that, who gives a shit? It doesn’t really mean anything.

Which leads me to my third biggest problem. Why should I give a shit about anything that’s going on? What are the stakes? There aren’t any. We don’t know anything about the Mandalorian and we have no reason to care about him or his job. We don’t know anything about the Child or why he’s so important. The only reason people are interested is because it reminds them of the other films. As a story in and of itself, there’s simply nothing there. I don’t know who any of these people are, what they want, why they want it and what will happen if they fail. So why should I give a shit? And nowhere is this more apparent than in the second episode. The Jawas agree to give the Mandalorian’s ship parts back if he retrieves an egg from some monster. Why do they want the egg? I don’t know. I literally have no idea. They never say. And yet that’s what the entire episode revolves around. This isn’t a story. It’s just random stuff happening. And what’s more it has nothing to do with the overall plot. You can literally cut out the entirety of episode two and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference. Same is true of that annoying fuckface that keeps insisting ‘he has spoken’ (I swear by the end I wanted to kick that old git in the face, he irritated me so much). We waste the second half of the first episode watching the Mandalorian piss about with some toad/horse thing only to then make his way back to the ship on foot in episode two. So what was the fucking point of that then? Why is anything fucking happening?

And this is what perfectly sums up the problems with Star Wars under Disney’s regime. If anything The Mandalorian acts as a microcosm for everything that’s wrong with the current movies and indeed Disney as a company. These movies aren’t movies. They’re products designed to pander to a gullible fanbase’s nostalgia. The entire sequel trilogy was basically the original trilogy repackaged and resold with nothing unique or original to offer. And the reason The Rise Of Skywalker felt so unsatisfying to everyone watching was because the story was never planned. They pivoted it to whatever the focus groups enjoyed about the previous film. That’s why the whole trilogy felt so uneven and directionless. And it’s not just Star Wars. Obviously there’s the live action remakes of the Renaissance movies, now with added nods and winks to meta commentary without actually addressing actual complaints people may have had. This also extends to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. How many of these fucking movies have we had where the bad guy tries to take over the world with an Infinity Stone? Thor: The Dark World and Guardians Of The Galaxy are pretty much the exact same movie. Spider-Man: Far From Home, a film co-produced with Sony, is ostensibly a rehash of Iron Man 3, which in turn had recycled a lot of its story from Pixar’s The Incredibles, another Disney product. Even Black Panther, a movie I absolutely adore, borrows its basic plot structure from Thor: Ragnarok. Disney are so unoriginal and so lazy that they have effectively started cannibalising themselves. The Mandalorian is just the latest example of this. At least with Black Panther you had a talented filmmaker like Ryan Coogler who was able to take these borrowed elements and spin it into something more meaningful and with more emotional impact. At least there was some actual passion put into that film.

People are no doubt going to have a go at me saying I’m being too harsh and that I haven’t given The Mandalorian a fair chance. Well I’m sorry, but I’ve given it two episodes and I’m bored out of my mind. It’s a cynically produced, uninspired load of waffle. I’m not going to waste my time sitting through more episodes in the hopes that it might get good later on. That’s not how good storytelling is supposed to work and it sickens me to think that this has pretty much become the new normal for this industry.

#the mandalorian #star wars #disney+#anti disney #quill's scribbles

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haroldgross · 3 years

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New Post has been published on Harold Gross: The 5a.m. Critic

New Post has been published on http://literaryends.com/hgblog/babylon-5-rewatch-n/

Babylon 5 (rewatch n)

[5 stars]

TL;DR: If you’ve not rewatched Babylon 5 recently, you should. If you’ve never seen it, make the time. Forgive its faults and revel in its incredibly intricate and intentional plotting that no one other than Dark has even come close to in the intervening years since its release. And gawk at its unexpected relevance 30 years after its original airing.

And, yes, I started this effort before the recent reboot announcement: https://deadline.com/2021/09/babylon-5-series-reboot-j-michael-straczynski-development-cw-1234845022/

There are some genre shows I come back to on a regular basis. No matter how many times I rewatch them, I find new moments or surprises…or simply enjoy certain stories so much I never get bored with them. Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Stargate SG-1, Star Trek (OS, TNG, DS9)…and Babylon 5 which is probably the least widely appreciated of that list, but which had a most outsized influence on the genre and all that followed.

I am more than willing to admit that some of the writing and directing of B5 is painful at times. But the fact that it remains rewatchable despite that and, more importantly, still relevant and impressive all these years later is a testament to what it was. B5 changed the landscape of genre TV. By creating a pre-planned 5-year arc J. Michael Straczynski (Sense8) was able to thread through clues and foreshadowing with intent rather than retconning them into plots conceived down the road. Not that the latter can’t be done well; Buffy and Angel did it all the time, as did Game of Thrones. But no one has come close to the beautiful construction of B5 through its first four seasons. And no show has purposely evolved in style, focus, and design from season to season the way B5 did. Only The Expanse comes close, and possible Farscape before it.

The simple truth is that if B5 had been birthed in the streaming world it would have been a smash. Its huge gamble was to have an ongoing tale rather than reset, episodic adventures. They kept losing audience and weren’t able to easily pick up new viewers since the earlier shows weren’t available. Joe was ahead of his time…but his influence reshaped entertainment and set a high bar.

But what is amazing to me is how relevant the story remains. Presented in the early 90s, I was glued to the TV every week watching the story reflect the world of politics and society…with a lot of grand adventure, humor, and action to boot. Decades later I was somewhat worried it would have gone threadbare. But no, the mirror still works for today, even with its faults (let’s face it, Joe really didn’t write women well, though he tried).

In fact, the first season or two are disturbingly accurate for today. Politics, in the era of 45, are even closer to the horror story B5 lays out. There are pandemics, which once reflected the AIDS crisis but today are a perfect extrapolation of COVID. Stories of media suppression and control in the age of Fox news and Murdoch. Endless wars and generational hate have moved from the Soviet Union to the Middle and Far East, but still echo in our reality. Honestly, you’d think it was written recently.

Up through most of season 3 and into the start of 4, Babylon is one of the most beautifully, tightly constructed shows ever put to screen. It would have been even better if they weren’t forced into 21 episode seasons; some of the pointless stand-alones could have been dropped. But if you’ve seen it more than once, you start noticing phrases and moments that wouldn’t originally pay off for, literally, years in air-time. The level of conviction and trust involved in that is breathtaking. Because of the history of the show (it wasn’t going to be renewed for broadcast and then had a last minute save for its final season on cable) the fourth season is a bit rushed at the end. And then the fifth season had its own struggles with budget and cast changes…and the fact that Joe did his fans a favor and gave us finale ahead of what he’d planned in case the fifth season never came.

The result is that the fourth season becomes more about falling dominos as the intricate clockwork of the plots spins down. Which isn’t to say that the fourth and fifth season don’t have their moments, but it is more about action and result and less interesting as a modern mirror. But it is still a great ride to the multiple conclusions of threads, revelations about moments we’d been promised and had misinterpreted for years, and harsh and honest commentary on world politics, religion, war, but most of all: humanity.

The real question now, after a recent announcement, is whether the story can be retold better than the original? I wasn’t expecting this when I started my rewatch. Will Joe and the studio allow more writers to be involved and more up-to-date world views (particularly around gender) to have traction? Is the CW really the best home for a show that is this adult? Frankly, I would have looked at streamer like Amazon, HBO Max, or Netflix where the grittier aspects would have been welcome, and where people could have jumped in at any time and started from the beginning. And I’d have pitched it more as an update and rethink than a reboot. But, regardless, I’ll certainly be there to find out if it can fly. If nothing else, perhaps we’ll finally get an HD version of this story since some idiot at Fox deleted all the digital originals to save disk space (no, I’m not kidding).

#5stars #Action #craft #MustSee #Mystery #Science Fiction #Suspense #TV Review

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your-dietician · 3 years

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Best Amazon Echo smart home devices and Kindle e-readers and more are on sale

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/health/best-amazon-echo-smart-home-devices-and-kindle-e-readers-and-more-are-on-sale/

Best Amazon Echo smart home devices and Kindle e-readers and more are on sale

We may receive commission from purchases made via links on this page. Pricing and availability are subject to change.

Nearly every Amazon smart home device and e-reader is on sale. (Photo: Amazon)

Hooray! Prime Day is going strong! Day 2 is here! Amazon has slashed prices on nearly all of its devices for the mega-shopping event, which ends at midnight PST. So if you’ve been reluctant to “add to cart,” there’s still time to save…but not too much.

What’s on sale? Just about all Amazon smart-home devices, Fire TV and tablets. A highlight: The very popular Echo Show 5 is on sale for its all-time lowest price ever ($45!). This display brings together all your smart-home devices, while also serving as a visual companion to Alexa. And right now it’s nearly 45 percent off!

What else is discounted? Audible, for your Amazon devices: Get a whopping 53 percent off the first four months of Audible Premium Plus, so you can up game with great audio books and more; summer “reading” has never been more fun.

Important: These deals, including the Echo Show 5, are exclusive to Amazon Prime members. Not yet a member? You can sign up for a free 30-day trial here and take advantage of all the deals below, plus free shipping and all sorts of other Prime benefits.

Scroll to get your hands on the best Prime Day, Day 2 deals on Amazon devices.

New Echo Buds are here — and they’re 33 percent off for Prime Day! (Photo: Amazon)

The latest Echo Buds feature active noise-canceling (not available with the first generation). Now you can enjoy your favorite music and podcasts free from annoying background noise. Score a pair for $80 with the standard charging case, or $100 with the wireless charging case, for Prime Day.

These second-generation Echo Buds are built for long-lasting comfort with a new, sleeker design that fits securely in your ears (unlike Apple AirPods). They deliver high-quality audio that’s well-balanced and clear with deep bass. These babies are durable and tough, with up to 15 hours of battery life per charge (and an extra two hours with a 15-minute quick charge). And your trusty Alexa voice assistant is built-in.

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“A quality pair of buds. Out of the box, setup was easy,” wrote a delighted five-star reviewer. “I already had the Alexa app on my phone, so all it took was having the app open while I opened the case on the new ear buds…. The audio playback is excellent. Experimented with some heavy metal and classical, and the sounds were great. Even the classics like Sinatra sounded great, with the vocals loud and clear.”

The new Echo Buds come in Black and Glacier White.

Read thousands of e-books with the Kindle Paperwhite — save nearly 40 percent! (Photo: Amazon)

Discounted from $130 to just $80, the Kindle Paperwhite is a great all-around e-reader. Thanks to its six-inch display with a built-in light and 300ppi (pixels per inch) for clarity, it reads just like paper — hence the name. Plus, it’s got lots of on-board storage (8GB), so it can hold thousands of e-books and digital magazines from Amazon’s digital bookstore.

“Best Kindle yet,” said one of many five-star reviewers. “This Kindle is lighter and thinner than the last generation, noticeably so. The flat edge-to-edge screen is an improvement in feel and makes it much easier to clean. It still has an excellent non-glare screen that I love for reading outdoors.”

One of the Kindle Paperwhite’s best features is its looooong battery life — it can go for up to six weeks per charge. That’s weeks, not hours!

Never switch out batteries again with this hardwired gadget. (Photo: Amazon)

Although it resembles a standard doorbell, the Ring Video Doorbell Wired is super-powered. This smart doorbell provides a 24/7 video stream and a nice wide field of view (up to 155 degrees horizontal and 90 degrees vertical), meaning you can see a broad swath of your property and any activity that might be occurring. And it syncs to your smartphone, tablet, laptop or streaming device (it’s easy — there’s a Ring app), so you can keep an eye on your home whether you’re inside, at work or away on that big vacation you’ve got coming up this summer. And this is the exact right moment to snap one up. For Prime members only, the Ring Video Doorbell Wired is down from $60 to just $45.

“I absolutely love this doorbell. I’m thrilled the doorbell doesn’t need batteries. I hated that,” said a five-star reviewer. “The setup is so easy and the doorbell notifications come through my phone and my Alexa Echo Dot…Plus, the quality of the sound from outside is really good too…. I would absolutely purchase this particular Ring doorbell again.”

The Ring Video Doorbell Wired is hardwired into your home’s electric system, so there’s no need to worry about replacing batteries every few months. As long as there’s electricity flowing through your home, this guy is on the job.

Save 50 percent: Echo Dot

Want to turn your home into a smart home? Start here. (Photo: Amazon)

With an all-new sphere design, the fourth generation Echo Dot — marked down from $50 to just $25 (half off!) for Prime members only — is a small but powerful smart speaker with a glow-light base that can not only channel Alexa but can also stream tunes from Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Sirius XM and more. It offers clearer, more robust audio quality than earlier iterations. Pair it with another Echo Dot to create amazing stereo sound — a particularly smart deal now that it’s half off!

Shoppers love the compact dimensions — it’s 3.5-inches high — which make it great for smaller rooms. “This is exactly what I was looking for,” said a happy Amazon shopper. “The sound is loud and clear. Now I am able to hear all online stations with no interference. The design is space-saving, with rubber underneath to prevent sliding.”

The Echo Dot 4 comes in Charcoal, Glacier White and Twilight Blue.

Stream live TV and free TV instantly. (Photo: Amazon)

Watch more TV for less with the Fire TV Stick Lite — on sale from $30 to just $18 for Amazon Prime members. It’s easy to set up: It plugs into just about any HD or 4K TV’s HDMI ports, syncs to Wi-Fi and then provides access to hundreds of streaming apps and channels, including Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+, YouTube, Prime Video, Starz, Showtime and much, much more. For someone looking to cut the cord with their cable provider, this is perfect.

“…I’m very pleased with the Fire TV Stick Lite,” shared a satisfied Amazon shopper. “Alexa is installed, and using voice commands to change the TV is so wonderful! I can also turn the lights off from my remote control when it’s time to movie-watch. I love it! Let’s see the cable companies let me do that! I figure I’ll be saving about $230 per month now, and all for an investment that was less than paying one month of a cable bill.”

For anyone wondering: The Fire TV Stick Lite is the same as the standard Fire TV Stick but with a different remote. This remote has Alexa voice assistant built-in, but it doesn’t have a TV on/off switch or volume controls, which is why it’s deemed ‘Lite’.

The Echo Show 5 is a smart-home display that covers a lot of ground — but takes up very little space. (Photo: Amazon)

On sale for $45 for Prime members only (was $80), the Show 5 is Echo’s smaller, sleeker model. Armed with a 5-inch display, the Echo Show 5 is the perfect compact and lightweight companion to your nightstand. This smart-home display can double as a digital alarm clock with Alexa built-in. In fact, Amazon has a wide range of personalized clock faces to choose from, so you can bring a little bit of your own personality to this device.

“This is the best alarm clock I’ve ever had,” wrote a delighted five-star reviewer. “The clock face is customizable and very easy to read from anywhere in the room. The screen has no distortion or discoloration from any angle, so it is easy to see from everywhere…Perfect for checking the time in the middle of the night.”

The Echo Auto makes your car as smart as your home, and is down to just $15, from $50. (Photo: Amazon)

If you’ve ever called out to Alexa in your car, only to find she wasn’t there, this is for you. The Echo Auto — on sale for a mere $15 from $50 for Prime members only — is a clever gizmo that instantly makes any old car smart. It connects to your car’s stereo via auxiliary input and pairs to your phone with Bluetooth.

The Echo Auto is designed with eight mighty microphones, so it can clearly pick up voice commands (no worries about a loud engine, or noisy traffic). It’s great for making hands-free phone calls and searching for your favorite tunes on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and more.

“I’m actually impressed with this little device….” shared a five-star Amazon reviewer. “It always picks up my voice no matter the sound level.”

The Blink Mini HD security cam keeps an eye on your home. (Photo: Amazon)

Some security cameras will set you back hundreds. For Prime Day, you can get this Blink Mini for just $20 — that’s $15 off — if you’re a Prime member.

This smart-home security camera detects motion — it can snap into record mode whenever it senses activity around your home. It comes with free cloud storage until the end of 2021, and It features Full HD live streaming and two-way audio, so you can talk to house guests via the Blink app.

“This is a great little camera monitor,” raved an excited five-star shopper. “It’s easy to set up and easily managed with your smartphone. Can be set up to arm and record at any time. I bought this to use in my master bedroom by my desk where I keep sensitive information.”

Save a third for Prime Day on this Insignia 43-inch Smart 4k Ultra HD TV. (Photo: Amazon)

On sale from $320 to just $220 for Prime members only, the Insignia 43-inch Smart 4K Ultra HD TV — Fire TV Edition is a total steal. This is its all-time lowest price ever, so it’s the perfect moment to grab it for a bedroom or guest room. With a beautiful, crisp image, this TV lets you stream movies and shows from Netflix, SlingTV, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Prime Video and more. Armed with an Ultra HD resolution of 2160p, this model is so popular it has earned a five-star rating from nearly 1,000 reviewers.

“I am so happy with my new Fire TV. The instructions weren’t complicated. I was able to switch flawlessly between my cable and the Fire TV apps,” shared a savvy Amazon shopper. “The clarity of the picture is wonderful…This is so perfect for me.”

Echo

Halo fitness

Luna gaming

Fire TV

Fire TV Cube, $80 (was $120), amazon.com

Fire TV Stick 4K, $25 (was $50), amazon.com

Insignia 24-inch Smart HD TV — Fire TV Edition, $100 (was $170), amazon.com

Toshiba 32-inch Smart HD TV — Fire TV Edition, $130 (was $200), amazon.com

Toshiba 43-inch Smart 4K Ultra HD — Fire TV Edition, $350 (was $240), amazon.com

Fire tablet

Kindle

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